THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 


PRESENTED  BY 

PROF.  CHARLES  A.  KOFOID  AND 
MRS.  PRUDENCE  W.  KOFOID 


SONG  BIRDS  AND  WATER  FOWL 


BOOKS  BY  H,  E.  PARKHURST 


SONG    BIRDS    AND   WATERFOWL.       Illustrated   by  Louis 

Agassiz  Fuertes.     I2mo,  net, $1.50 

THE  BIRDS'  CALENDAR.     With  24  Illustrations.     J2mo,  net,       1.50 


BOBOLINKS 
An  intoxicated   bobolink,   madly  singing  in  his  wild  career  (p.   187). 


SONG    BIRDS    AND 
WATER    FOWL 


BY 

H.   E.   PARKHURST 

AUTHOR  OF   THE    "BIRDS1    CALENDAR'' 


4  This  sport,  well  carried,  shall  be  chronicled." 

Shakespeare 


ILLUSTRATED 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1897  - 


COPYRIGHT,  1897,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


TROW  DIRECTOar 

INTING  AND  BOOKBINDING  COMPANf 

NEW  YORK 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


A  Bouquet  of  Song  Birds   .....      1 

Water  Fowl  ..........    41 

A  Bird's-  Eye  View      .......    61 

Mistress  Cuckoo     ........    97 

Sea  Swallows     .........  119 

Birds'  Nests  ..........  137 

At  the  Water's  Edge  .......  153 

Lake  George      .........  205 

A  Colony  of  Herons  .......  235 

Earliest  Signs  of  Spring  ......  251 


LIST  OF   ILLUSTRATIONS* 
Bobolinks Frontispiece 


FACING 
PAGE 


Hooded  Warblers.     .     . 10 

Water  Thrush 30 

Herring  Gulls 56 

Pied-billed  Grebes 68 

American  Avocets 84 

Sea  Parrots  (Tufted  Puffins)    ....  96 

Cuckoos ".     ...  106 

Sea  Swallows  (Terns) 122 

Stormy  Petrels 136 


*The  artist  wishes  to  acknowledge  his  indebtedness 
to  the  authorities  of  the  American  Museum  for  many 
courtesies. 

vii 


List  of  Illustrations 


FACING 
PAGE 


Birds'  Nests 146 

Shore  Lark  (Horned  Lark)      .     .     .     .  168 

Semipalmated  Plovers 176 

Osprey 192 

Cliff  Swallows 214 

Cedar-birds 224 

Great  Blue  Heron 248 

Meadow  Lark 276 


viii 


A  Bouquet  of  Song  Birds 


'  Herkneth  thise  blisful  briddes  how  they  singe, 
And  see  the  fresshe  floures  how  they  springe : 
Ful  is  myn  hert  of  revel  and  solas." 

Chaucer. 


A  BOUQUET  OF  SONG  BIRDS 

|NE  of  the  most  famous  resorts  of 
land-birds  in  the  Eastern  States  is 
in  the  town  of  Englewood,  N.  J. ; 
to  be  precise,  West  Englewood,  a 
small  farming  district  at  some  distance  from 
Englewood  itself.  But  let  no  one,  meditating  a 
trip  to  this  avian  shrine,  be  misled,  as  I  nearly 
was,  by  an  unscrupulous  ticket-agent  of  the  New 
Jersey  Northern  Railroad,  who  tried  to  persuade 
me  that  all  of  Englewood  worth  mentioning 
was  on  his  road — a  statement  fully  two  miles 
wide  of  the  truth,  for  West  Englewood  is  on 
the  West  Shore  road.  The  circumstance  that 
makes  this  an  attractive  spot  to  the  feathered 
tribe  is  its  variety  of  topography,  and,  con- 
sequently, of  vegetable  and  animal  life;  for, 
within  a  small  area,  are  comprised  upland  and 
swamp,  woods,  shrubbery,  and  open  land — 
quite  an  epitome  of  nature — with  such  diversity 
of  growth  as  to  allure  the  varied  tastes  of  a  wide 
range  of  species.  In  contrast  with  the  Ramble 


Song  Birds  and  Water  Fowl 

of  Central  Park  in  New  York  City,  this  spot, 
though  so  accessible  and  provided  with  several 
intersecting  roads,  is  yet  so  wild  and  secluded 
as  to  retain  a  large  number  of  its  migrant  spring 
visitors  through  the  summer  ;  and  thus  affords 
favorable  opportunities  for  studying  their  more 
interesting  aspects  of  song  and  nidification. 

About  the  middle  of  May  one  always  finds 
here  not  only  a  remarkable  variety  of  species, 
representative  of  all  our  land-birds,  but  an  im- 
mense number  of  specimens  of  all  the  various 
sorts.  Leaving  the  train  at  Hackensack,  two 
miles  south  of  Englewood,  and  inquiring  for 
the  road  leading  thither  of  a  gentleman  who 
thought  it  preposterous  that  I  should  wish  to 
walk,  when  I  could  just  as  well  have  ridden — 
thus  betraying  the  fact  that  he  was  not  a  natu- 
ralist— I  at  once  found  myself  in  the  midst  of  a 
company  of  clear- voiced  field-sparrows.  Simple 
and  artless  as  it  is,  nothing  in  the  range  of  mu- 
sic could  have  expressed  more  happily  the  spirit 
of  peace  pervading  the  pastoral  scene  to  which 
I  had  come,  with  the  harsh  rattle  of  city  pave- 
ments as  yet  hardly  out  of  my  ears. 

Pretention  is  as  far  from  the  heart  of  any 
sparrow  as  the  east  is  from  the  west ;  but,  in 
this  respect,  perhaps  the  bashful  little  field-spar- 


A  Bouquet  of  Song  Birds 

row  beats  them  all ;  for  he  is  the  very  embodi- 
ment of  modesty.  Sometimes  he  mounts  a  lit- 
tle way  up  a  tree,  and  delivers  his  apologetic 
little  message;  but  often  he  is  too  humble  even 
to  do  that,  and  will  stand  on  the  ground,  throw 
up  his  tiny  red  bill,  and  pour  forth  his  mild  and 
sweet  salute.  The  note  of  the  field-sparrow  is 
like  a  pleasant  word  dropped  in  the  morning, 
that  dissolves  into  a  faint  radiance  for  the  en- 
tire day.  It  would  be  incongruous  to  greet  its 
simple  melody  with  boisterous  praise ;  there  are 
some  deeds  for  whose  performance  silence  is 
the  best  applause.  The  song  of  this  bird  is 
much  like  that  of  the  vesper-sparrow — three  or 
four  detached  notes  followed  by  a  rippling 
sound,  like  the  melodious  drops  of  a  broken 
stream  of  water  ;  but  not  so  loud,  rich,  and  as- 
sertive as  in  the  vesper-sparrow.  However,  if 
the  softer-voiced  field-sparrow  lives  and  over- 
comes his  modesty,  he  will  become  quite  as 
pleasing  a  singer  as  his  better  known  and  more 
confident  brother — who,  by  the  way,  sings  all 
through  the  day,  and  not  merely  at  evening,  as 
a  well-known  writer  has  mistakenly  asserted. 
While  almost  all  sparrows  prefer  the  more  open 
places  to  the  deeper  woods,  this  is  emphatically 
true  of  field  and  vesper  sparrows,  that  are  par- 


